May 25, 2011

Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu are staging at exhibit at the New Museum in New York--or rather, staging it in an old restaurant supply store next to the New Museum. Cronocaos is a polemic against preservationism that erases the most difficult and challenging periods of history while displacing the poor and the powerless to make way for gentrification and tourism.

This argument isn't new idea. Koolhaas has refashioned it for his campaign against what he regards as outdated modes of urbanism. His dramatizes his point most effectively by rehabbing one half of the restaurant supply store, leaving the other half its old, crappy self. Nicolai Ourousoff, for one, was impressed:

The result is startling. The uneven, patched-up floors and soiled walls of the old space look vibrant and alive; the new space looks sterile, an illustration of how even the minimalist renovations favored by art galleries today, which often are promoted as ways of preserving a building’s character, can cleanse it of historical meaning. (To sharpen the contrast further, Mr. Koolhaas scattered a few beat-up tables and chairs, salvaged when CBGB was closed five years ago, throughout the room.)

The grubby old supply store seems vibrant and alive--as historical--only by virtue of its contrast with the musuem space marked by all the generic symbols of high culture. Without a New Museum exhibit by one of the world's most famous architects dropped into it, the empty supply store is a null space hovering between repetition and infill, between yet another low-margin retail business and a new struture. Also at work is Koolhaas's old surrealist genius, imbuing old everyday objects with barely recognizable yet somehow loaded meanings.

One can agree with Koolhaas's position on preservationism yet still be pleased to see the store building gutted and rehabbed to its "original" state, which I'm betting wasn't as a restaurant supply store. Whose history is being preserved in the supply store as it is now?

More provacative, however, is Koolhaas's remarks on the destruction of Modernist buildings from the 1960s and 1970s. Often these buildings are being destroyed for ideological rather than aesthetic reasons. The pressures to demolish the Boston City Hall or Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago isn't an attack on an outmoded aesthetic, but on the idea of architecture itself.

May 20, 2011

If one Googles long enough you could find a reading list for every occasion: what to read while waiting for an extremely pissed off Israeli prime minister to arrive, for instance, or while under house arrest in a $14,000 a month apartment on the Upper East Side. Here are two more reading lists, one if you're pregnant, and one to prepare for the Rapture this weekend. (It's one list or the other, both not both.)

If What to Expect When You're Expecting isn't neurotic enough for you, the newly pregnant Edan Lepucki has a reading list that begins with Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin. "Every pregnant woman wonders, at least once," Lepucki writes, "if she’s got the devil’s spawn growing inside of her." Carolyn Kellogg offers "The Last-Minute Rapture Reading List." The list includes The Book of Revelation for Dummies, the Bible ("Go back to the source," Kellogg recommends), and The Inferno ("Once you're done with this, you'll want to be saved.").

Regular readers of Maud Newton's blog and other writings know two things about her: she's a very nice person and she grew up in Florida, which practically guarantees an upbringing with some weirdness in it. The Rapture coincides with her 40th birthday, and her stomach is churning:

though I don't expect the End of the World to be set in motion this Saturday night, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if it were. Fatalism comes easy when you grew up bracing for the apocalypse, being told that that, sometime very soon, probably next year but possibly tomorrow morning, a fiery mountain would fall into the sea, the oceans would turn to blood and then the moon would, and soon after that a third of all living things on the earth would die. Never mind homework, forget the boy you had a crush on, it would be best to turn down the lead role in the school musical, for there was no time to waste. Jesus could return at any moment, that was the crucial thing, and it was our duty to spread the word. Also, to repent, because if you hadn't been forgiven for every sin you'd ever committed, no matter how tiny, even if you didn't know it was a sin, you'd be regrettably yet decisively Left Behind.

Harold Bloom, I'm pretty certain, has other weekend plans besides strolling the golden streets with angels. “For me, Shakespeare is God,” he tells the New York Times on the occasion of the appearance of his latest book, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life. Outside of The Anxiety of Influence and a few remarks on Shakespeare, his influence among his fellow English professors is virtually nil, but what a life of reading. Sam Tanenhaus has a long profile of the 80-year-old Yale professor, complete with a moving video interview.

Walter Benjamin also wouldn't be moved by any of the Rapture nonsense, but nevertheless he had a keen interest in historical periods in which people sometimes longed for the world to come to an end. The German mourning play, or Trauerspiel was an expression of the anguished uncertainties of the seventeenth century. Harvard University Press is publishing a collection of Benjamin's Early Writings (1910-1917). Before Benjamin descended into the gloom of the Trauerspiel he was a fervently optimistic member of the German Youth Movement in the years before World War I. Benjamin's early essays are audacious and muddled as he exorts his fellow youth to rebel against the stiffling culture of pre-war Germany. One can glimpse the mature Benjamin in these writings, especially when he starts to write about literature.

May 18, 2011

Granta Magazine has just released its issue 115, The F Word. The word under the veil is feminism, a term that one would think would be outdated, at least in the Sixties and Seventies connotations of empowerment. However, allegedly even today there are elderly Gallic satyrs pouncing on hotel chambermaids, reminding us that the basic lessons of feminism have not yet been learned in some less developed peoples, like the political elite in France.

The editors of Granta introduce their 115th issue by asserting,

From Ghana to Great Britain, New Delhi to New York, the balance of power remains tipped towards men. Granta 115: The F Word explores the ways in which feminism continues to inform, address and complicate that balance.

Writing in the Independent, Arifa Akbar wonders exactly what feminism is up to these days.

Revisiting the debate on women's writing and feminism might now be considered a redundant exercise in an age where books written by women extend across genres and jostle for literary prizes and front-of-store positioning. The 1970s dictum of "writing by women, about women, for women" is certainly a historical anachronism. Philosophical arguments about writing the body are unfashionable with critical theorists and the question of whether women write as gendered beings is dismissed for failing to appreciate the governing role of the imagination in the writing process.

This year's Orange Prize in particular has raised questions about the relevance and purpose of female-only literary awards. For a long time Jean Hannah Edelstein had paid little attention to the Orange Prize because "I have always agreed with AS Byatt that it was sexist. 'It assumes there is a feminine subject matter,' she said."

One could also add that the Orange Prize should be ignored because of questionable taste after Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad didn't make the short list.

At any rate, Edelstein reluctantly admits that the Orange Prize may be worthwhile after all. She sifts through the recent evidence of the short thrift women writers have gotten in literary magazines and criticism and concludes,

I've changed my mind about the Orange prize. I still agree with Byatt that the idea of female-specific subject matter is spurious, but I don't think that's what the prize rewards. As long as women writers are forced to continue the exhausting battle for equal billing, they need the Orange prize to demonstrate the accomplishment and variety of their work.

As I've mentioned, the Granta issue appeared few days before the DSK affair started. It also appeared the day before Bridesmaids went into general release in the U.S. The film has gotten generally highly positive reviews, with most reviewers noting that it's The Hangover with women. The film raises issues a number of issues that have troubled feminism for decades. What is authentically female experience? Can any female writer (or scriptwriter, in the case of Bridesmaids) reproduce it? Are women empowered whenever they assume traditionally male roles, regardless of the role?

May 17, 2011

Reveal is the title of the new monograph by Jeanne Gang, the principal of Studio Gang Associates, the Chicago architecture firm responsible for the Aqua Tower, among the best new high rises recently erected in the United States. The title reflects the firm's approach to designing and constructing a building. Ordinarily a building design begins with a vision. Mies van der Rohe used to sketch out his ideas obsessively as he refined his vision of what his buildings should look like. Gang approaches a project as an investigation into the site, the client, the environment--all the systems, seen and unseen, that influence a project and may be impacted by the finished structure.

The best example of Studio Gang's architectural investigations is the Ford Calumet Environmental Center. The building site is a marsh surrounded by abandoned steel mills on Chicago's south side. The steel industry was once a mighty engine of the American economy, but the industry was run by slobs. They dumped all kinds of junk into the marshes. For birds, however, the marsh might as well be the Everglades. Dozens of different bird species use the marsh as a resting point on their migration path.

Gang mapped out the migratory path, which passes right over the center of the city. Very few Chicagoans are aware that the skyscrapers directly north of the site stand in the way of the migrating birds. Night flying over Chicago's airspace is particularly hazardous; skyscrapers thrust themselves into the birds' flight paths, and building lights disorient the birds, causing untold casualties. To drive the point home, Gang includes a gruesome two-page photo spread of bird carcasses.

Not only does Gang reveal the mass migrations passing over the heads of nearly three million city residents, but her team goes to the trouble of tracking down the names of the industrial refuse they discover at the site. Once these materials have been named, they can be seen, and then used. The architects later incorporated the discarded material into the design of the Calumet Environmental Center itself--exactly like a bird would build its nest.

Most of Gang's investigations end up with materials. The most exhaustive and enthusiastic study of materials took place in a project for the International Masonry Institute and the National Building Museum. She provides a "Step By Step Guide to Making a Marble Curtain." Before you attempt to build one yourself, you should know there are ten steps involved in creating a 680-piece, 2,000 pound marble curtain--all of them maddeningly complex. The result, however, is a thing of unexpected beauty. The project confirms Gang as a tactile, artisanal architect in the manner of Renzo Piano, although without the Italian architect's refinement. Gang knows when to push a material to its outer limit, as in the case of the marble curtain, and when to leave it alone, such as when she made sure that a concrete wall for a childcare center showed all the strata of the different types of donated concrete.

Studio Gang's hands-on approach extends to all levels of the practice. Gang's partner Mark Schendel demonstrates why it's important for architects to create their own hand-made models. The laser-cut models produced from CAD designs can be "dull" and "boring" and "ugly, but not in an instructive way." Bond paper, on the other hand, is "the most amazing modeling material there is."

In the handful of photographs of Studio Gang at work, they are always making something, never sitting before a computer. They do more than just tinker with models and material samples. They also delve into the social and historical contexts of their buildings. These efforts are represented in broadsheet inserts concluding each section of the book. Each broadsheet is a miniature history lesson relating to the project. The broadsheets fold out, one of several clever features devised by the book's designer, Elizabeth Azen. One of the best tells the story of the lighthouses in Plymouth, England. The original lighthouse was swept away to sea in 1703, carrying away its architect with it, but the second, completed in 1759, still stands. The only broadsheet that doesn't succeed is a story about murder in the backwoods of South Carolina. It's not clear what the story of is supposed to reveal about its project, a nature center in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The woods are full of villainous moonshiners? That nature without architecture, without form, drives people a little crazy?

Reveal gets a little unfocused toward the end, a perhaps inevitable consequence of Gang's mapie approach. Each project is a little drama of exploration, with Gang serving more as a guide than an author. There are no traces of the architect's genius, like Daniel Libeskind's napkin sketches or Santiago Calatrava's watercolor sketches. Instead, Reveal contains all the stuff that's usually thrown away after a project is complete. "Architecture is a practice of amnesia," Gang writes. In Reveal she gathers all the sketches, essays, and early notes from early in her projects, when meaning has not yet been finalized.

May 13, 2011

Every Monday through Thursday I cram a ThinkPad, an iPad, two iPhones, a Rhodia notebook, two fountain pens, and a book into a single pannier, and latch it onto my bike. I ride to the train station, ride a commuter train downtown, then drag the saddlebag across the Loop to the building in which I work. My employer allocates work space on the hotel system, meaning that cubicles and offices must be reserved, like hotel rooms. A sign above each desk reminds the occupant to clean out the drawers for the next occupant--not that anyone ever feels at home long enough to put anything in a drawer. At the end of the workday, I have to make sure I pack everything back up. I can't leave any traces.

On Fridays I work from home, like virtually everyone in my company. I work at the dining room table or on the living room couch. My desk was discarded when I got married. On the next trash day my favorite chair will be put to the curb because my kids broke it. In my work life, which includes writing this blog, I live an increasingly placeless, objectless existence. I'm feeling a little incorporeal myself. A room of one's own? All I have is a 1,400 cubic-inch saddlebag.

Partly this is a consequence of my job; I manage a team that builds mobile apps. The mobile space, as people refer to it, originated as a between space, between office and home. One checked one's Blackberry, pecked out a response, and that was about it. For me mobile is a destination. It's where I go to work. I'm permanently in transit, never quite arriving anywhere, only circling back.

You might think I long for a book-lined study. That would be nice, but I'm perfectly happy working in a public library. On Fridays I will sometimes bike to my local library and set up my laptop. The Wilmette library has those great big wooden tables, chairs that are comfortable to the right degree, and a strong wi-fi signal. There's something calming about working in a space that is quiet, yet occupied by other people. I always feel at home when I'm surrounded by books, even when they're not mine. It's for these reasons, I'm certain, Walter Benjamin spent 13 years scribbing notes for his Aracades Project in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. It was his room of his own.

Whenever I'm in a public library there are other people working on laptops just as I am. When you think about it, it's remarkable that in the age of cloud computing people still lug their laptops to the library. Salon's Laura Miller noticed the same phenomenon in the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. The oak tables in the Rose Main Reading Room (image above) have power outlets and half of them are occupied by people with laptops. "Yes, they have laptops and yet they've come to the library," she exclaims. (Emphasis hers.)

Sure, the New York Public Library has great objects in it--books and Charles Dickens' letter opener and things like that--but perhaps its most important offering is peace and quiet. Conservatives here and in the U.K. are trying to slash library budgets because, they argue, the Internet has rendered libraries obsolete. Miller argues that libraries remain relevant because they offer quiet.

Access to a little peace and quiet is as essential to a humane society as access to parks and art. That's not something the Internet is ever going to be able to give us. It can only be found in a real, not a virtual, place, which is what libraries have always been and what we all still need them to be.

So for this Fun Friday I encourage you to go to your local public library with your laptop or your Kindle (I've seen people reading Kindles in the library) or your iPad or even your own book. You'll most likely find it's just loud enough to drown out the electronic noise of your device, but quiet enough to allow to you think.

May 11, 2011

One day a three-year-old girl was watching Disney's 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As Snow White and the prince rode off into the sunset and the story reached its happy ending, the little girl was devastated. "More!" she demanded.

Watching the film with the little girl was her father's friend, David Bordwell, the eminent film scholar. Bordwell asked an interesting question, one that would only occur to a film studies person: How did the little girl know the story was ending? In a blog post called "Molly wanted more" he started to think about how classical-style movies start to tell stories and how they end them.

What he noticed was that films commonly begin by progressively moving into a story space. Snow White, for instance, begins with an extreme long shot of the Queen's castle, then, in a three-shot sequence, to the Queen reflected in her mirror.

In the same way, films often end with a withdrawal from story space and its characters. Silence of the Lambs ends with the camera leaving Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter moving away from the camera and disappearing into a crowd.

Bordwell postulates that Molly recognized a pattern in Snow White that exists in social encounters. We enter and leave encounters with others, and so the camera does the same.

The entry/ leave-taking pattern mimics our activities as perceiving, socially inclined people. For creatures like us, to encounter a new situation or setting simply involves approaching it or letting it approach us, then becoming part of it and fixing our attention on its details. At a party, we amble closer to a knot of people we want to talk with, or someone comes up to us. Sooner or later that encounter ends or trails off, and we withdraw or turn away or watch when others depart. More poignantly, the extreme long-shot option can recall moments when a car or bus or train carried us away from our loved ones. In any case, thanks to moving images the salient features of this very common experience can be made tangible for viewers.

The little girl "had already logged three years of social experience," but logged no time reading Film Art, yet she was able to perceive a common social pattern in Snow White.

Bordwell suggests that there more cinematic forms may be grounded in social practice, that not all aesthetic forms are entirely artificial. One immediate response would be to caution against removing aesthetic forms from history and making them somehow natural. Another possibility is that Molly wasn't reacting to the loss of the characters, but to the disappearance of the image of her object of desire, Snow White, the first Disney princess. Her call of "more!" could have been her own fort/da game. In other words, the experience had more to do with the girl's increasingly more sophisticated encounter with language, not other people.

In any case, Bordwell hopes to investigate the issue more. The results should be highly interesting.

If you live in Florida, this piece of news may or may not change your weekend plans. The lede says it all: "Floridians are going to have to start pulling up their pants and stop having sex with animals soon."

Which reminds me The Beaver goes into general release this week. When it debuted at the SXSW film festival it took a lot of people by surprise and lots of snark ensured. By now critics are better prepared, so they're seeing substantial--compared to Thor, anyway. Manohla Dargis describes Jodie Foster's film as a standard family melodrama, then goes on to suggest that the family would have been happier if Mel Gibson's character had been institutionalized. That way, "Gibson would still be able to deliver a gesturally and vocally persuasive performance as the man with two heads, one meat and one cloth." Roger Ebert also grudgingly admires Gibson's performance, but he can't suspend disbelief as often as the film demands. For instance, he doubts Matt Lauer would interview a guy with a beaver puppet on the real Today show. I would venture to guess that Matt Lauer would interview an actual beaver on live TV without blinking an eye, but Ebert's point is taken.

The consensus seems to be that it's a conventional melodrama with a peculiar premise, but it's hard to look beyond Mel Gibson with a beaver puppet. Adding Jodie Foster to the mix makes matters worse. Roland Barthes couldn't sort through the layers of weirdness.

Next Sunday, May 15 my hometown offers a housewalk featuring the work of four major Chicago architects in Wilmette: An American Foursquare house by George Maher from the 1890s; Alfred Alschuler's Spanish Revival mansion from the 1920s; an International Style house by George Fred Keck from the 1930s; and a mid-century modern home by Harry Weese from the 1950s. No examples, however, from A.J. Del Bianco, the Chicago architect who designed my house, as well as a number of other modern-style homes in the area. Stanley Tigerman started his Chicago architecture career working in Del Bianco's firm.

According to this short film, in the future there won't be much room for architect-designed single-family houses. Everyone's daily lives will be controlled by a computer and everyone will be a vegetarian. (I'm not sure which is more scary.)

Currently I'm reading Al Gore's Our Choice, his 2007 book updated for the iPad and the iPhone. In this version he addresses the global warming deniers with his trademark sternness, comparing them to birthers.

I'm reading the iPad version, and it's the best e-book I've seen so far. The app's undeniable coolness factor clashes a bit with Gore's wooden Indian style and there's an extra twinge of guilt in enjoying the beauty of the images of environmental catastrophe. Features like interactive graphs make the scientific details much more memorable. Now I know the difference betwen carbon dioxide and methane. There are bits of alarming data here and there; ten percent of the methane in the atmosphere comes from rice farming. I thought most of the methane came from fossil fuels and cow flatulence. I never would have dreamed rice could pollute. I guess I'm happy to know that now.

May 02, 2011

At one point as I was writing my doctoral dissertation on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project I jokingly suggested to my dissertation advisor that I should leave the project unfinished, just like the Arcades Project itself. "Ah, the mimetic fallacy!" he responded. That ended the conversation. His point was clear: just because one imitates something doesn't mean one can reproduce it.

That fallacy seems to be at work in Kenneth Goldsmith's fascinating yet perplexing attempt to rewrite the Arcades Project as an exploration of New York City in the twentieth century instead of Paris in the nineteenth century. He explains,

The idea is to use Benjamin’s identical methodology in order to write a poetic history of New York City in the twentieth century, just as Benjamin did with Paris in the nineteenth. Thus, I have taken each of his original chapter headings (convolutes) and, reading through the entire corpus of literature written about NYC in the twentieth century, I have taken notes and selected what I consider to be the most relevant and interesting parts, sorting them into sheaves identical to Benjamin’s.

I’ve tried to maintain as perfect as possible a mirror of Benjamin’s project.

Goldsmith can't copy it exactly. He has to find substitutes for some of the major figures in Benjamin's work. Baron Haussmann becomes Robert Moses, an inspired choice. Goldsmith substitutes Robert Mapplethorpe for Charles Baudelaire, which makes sense at the level of a poète maudit. However, to my mind Mapplethorpe's work isn't rich or varied enough to carry the conceptual weight Benjamin placed upon Baudelaire. Andy Warhol would have made a better twentieth-century Baudelaire.

Goldsmith also doesn't seem to have a substitute for the Paris arcades, Benjamin's "dialectical fairyland." Benjamin regarded the arcades as the origin of capitalist culture, the "hollow mold out of which the modern was cast." In Goldsmith's admittedly brief account of his own project, I don't see an equivalent central image. He wants to "read through and describe the magnitude and complexity of the New York City in the twentieth century." By comparison, Benjamin's intent was radically reductionist, even as his notes proliferated. He never would have been satisfied with simply representing complexity.

Another problem with rewriting the Arcades Project is defining it. Goldsmith reports he's written 500 pages so far, "approximately half way to the 1000+ pages that constitutes Benjamin’s book." Except that there's no such thing as "Benjamin's book"--never mind the differences between the Harvard English translation and the German edition as volume 5 of Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften. Everyone agrees that the Arcades Project is the collection of roughly 10,000 notes Benjamin took during his reading in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. However, the notes--not all of them quotations, by the way--were never intended to be ends in themselves. Benjamin made a number of attempts to bring his material into publishable form, including the two precises he produced for Theodor Adorno and the Frankfort Institute. There are also notes Benjamin took as he worked on the essays, as well as his correspondence with Adorno and others. In one letter Adorno shot down Benjamin's proposal to publish the Arcades Project as a montage of quotations, which is what Goldsmith intends to create.

I once contemplated rewriting the Arcades Project, but I dismissed the idea as unworkable. Nevertheless, Benjamin's example is an alluring one, and I haven't completely given up on adapting his representational methodology for a project. I wish Goldsmith luck in his endeavor. He's taken on a huge task. The results will certainly be interesting. They just may not be Benjaminian.

What Is One-Way Street?

One-Way Street [Einbahnstrasse, 1928] was Walter Benjamin's first effort to break out of the narrow confines of the academy and apply the techniques of literary studies to life as it is currently lived. For Benjamin criticism encompasses the ordinary objects of life, the literary texts of the time, films in current release, and the fleeting concerns of the public sphere. Following Benjamin's lead, this blog is concerned with the political content of the aesthetic and representations of the political in the media. As Benjamin writes in One-Way Street, "He who cannot take sides should keep silent."